Atheists Brook No Dissent

We take it as an article of secular faith that atheists are more open minded. Many professed atheists cling to their beliefs because they want to show the world that they reject all religious dogmas in favor of science?

We accept, unthinkingly and unknowingly, that the religious adhere to their dogmas while atheists, rational to a fault, are more open to alternative perspectives. After all, religions—some of them, at least—have notably conducted inquisitions to rid themselves of heretical beliefs.

On this topic history has been flashing a few warning lights. What was totalitarian Communism but an effort to transform cultures and make them more godless? No atheist will accept that Communism represents the goal he is seeking. And yet, people who claim to be empirical thinkers cannot dismiss the Communist effort to atheize culture. If you only accept the evidence that seems to prove you to be right, you are not thinking empirically or scientifically.

If atheists hold up British or American culture as their role models, they will have to recognize that those cultures were based in religious principles. They were not founded or constructed by atheists. As David Hume famously noted, ethical thinking does not and cannot come from science. Science is about is, he said, while ethics is about should.

Communist cultures brooked no dissent. In truth, they perfected the arts of brainwashing and indoctrination. The notion of thinking differently, of entertaining different opinions, was anathema. They wanted to create a culture where everyone thought the same thoughts, believed the same beliefs and felt the same feelings. In the past certain religions aspired to achieve the same goal, but today, those who yearn most avidly for groupthink tend to be atheists.

Today’s masters of political correctness-- dare we note that they are inevitably atheists-- are keeping dogmatism alive. They label differences of opinion as hate speech. They shut down people who hold divergent points of view. 

If you do not think as they think you will be shunned. If you think that this is an anomalous condition, limited to faculty lounges, you should note that in Silicon Valley, in Hollywood and in the San Fernando Valley, saying that you voted for Donald Trump will cost you work. It will make you unemployable. For the record, the San Fernando Valley is the epicenter of the American pornography industry. If you are in porn, you should not to speak well of Trump. Link here. Call it, news you might not want to use.

Some religions have more dogmas than others, but most religions also have widely divergent opinions about nearly all matters, theological and otherwise. Obviously, there are limits. But, a journey through the arcana of theology will show you vast differences of opinion. Thomists and Franciscans and Jesuits are all good Catholics. But, they certainly do not think the same thing.

Now we have a scientific study of the issue. Conducted by scholars from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, the study showed that atheists are, ounce for ounce, more intolerant than the religious.  They are more narrow minded and more incapable of accepting different points of view.

True enough, atheists believe that they are more open minded. Yet, when you poke beneath the surface of the atheist mind, you will someone who is more, not less bigoted than someone who follows a religion.

PsyPost summarizes the results:

New research indicates that religious believers can be better at perceiving and integrating different perspectives than atheists in Western Europe.

“The main message of the study is that closed-mindedness is not necessarily found only among the religious,” the study’s corresponding author, Filip Uzarevic of the Catholic University of Louvain, told PsyPost.

The research was published April 27, 2017, in the peer-reviewed journal Personality and Individual Differences.

“The idea started through noticing that, in public discourse, despite both the conservative/religious groups and liberal/secular groups showing strong animosity towards the opposite ideological side, somehow it was mostly the former who were often labeled as ‘closed-minded’,” Uzarevic explained. “Moreover, such view of the secular being more tolerant and open seemed to be dominant in the psychological literature. Being interested in this topic, we started to discuss whether this is necessarily and always the case: Are the religious indeed generally more closed-minded, or would it perhaps be worthy of investigating the different aspects of closed-mindedness and their relationship with (non)religion. ”

The researchers found that Christian participants scored higher on a measure of dogmatism than nonreligious participants. The Christian participants, for instance, were more likely to disagree with statements such as “There are so many things we have not discovered yet, nobody should be absolutely certain his beliefs are right.”

On one score, Christians seem more narrow-minded. They believe that most truths have already been discovered. Yet, the question feels unnecessarily vague.

Does it refer to moral principles or to scientific fact? One might argue that the moral precepts discovered, say, by Aristotle, Confucius and the Bible have not been significantly modified or superseded over millennia. One might also argue that science is making new discoveries every day; the book of science is certainly not closed.

As the researchers dug deeper they discovered that atheists were more closed-minded than the religious:

Atheists tended to show greater intolerance of contradiction, meaning when they were presented with two seemingly contradictory statements they rated one as very true and the other as very false. They also showed less propensity to be able to imagine arguments contrary to their own position and find them somewhat convincing.

Intriguing, don’t you think?  Atheists are more intolerant of contradictory statements. They are less likely to engage with people who hold different opinions. They prefer to dismiss differing opinions as extreme.

Is there something about atheism that entices people into extreme positions? Is there something about this exercise in pseudo-rationality that deprives people of the ability to think differently? Is there something about  atheism that tends toward the dogmatic and that makes people incapable of considering alternative points of view.

Perhaps they should all take a course in the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. While Catholic theology has room for the Platonist Augustine and the Aristotelian Aquinas— whose views often diverge—today’s atheists reject all dissenting opinions, even those that are based on scientific fact.

To offer some obvious examples, the nature lovers among us, nearly all of whom would reject the least whiff of religious reasoning, will tell you that if you do not accept their view of climate change you are a denier. They will not engage your point of view, or even the point of view of experts like Richard Lindzen. They will dismiss you as an extremist or bigot. And they will accuse you of trying to exterminate the human species. People will die… they will intone.

Any atheist who holds to the dogmatic truths about transgenderism will quickly dismiss the work of eminent physicians like Paul McHugh and Lawrence Mayer as so much bigotry. They refuse to engage with dissenting views. And, since the Bible tells us that God made human beings as man and woman, then God must be a sexist bigot. Again, dissenting or even differing opinions about these articles of today’s secular dogma are not allowed to be contradicted. Atheists brook no dissent.

Is it fair to say that these practitioners of extremism are all atheists? At the least, they believe themselves to be at war with religions and with any other system of moral thinking that contradicts their dogmas.